Feminism

From Conservapedia

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes - who were predominantly pro-life[1][2][3]- to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored abortion and identical roles or quotas for women in the military and in society as a whole.

Specifically, a modern feminist denies or downplays differences between men and women, opposes the encouragement of homemaking and child-rearing for women, and seeks to participate in predominantly male activities, possibly including sexual intercourse with women. In some cases, they also are misandrists in nature and practice. Most modern feminists:

prefer that women wear pants rather than dresses, presumably because men do[4][5]

in movies, portray the men as inherently evil, dumb or incompetent, and the women as inherently good, smart or competent (note that this conflicts with gender equality)

pretend that there are no meaningful differences between men and women when that advances liberal causes (e.g., women and men equally in military combat, to weaken the U.S. military), but reject equality when that results in more money to women (e.g., VAWA funding of women's groups)

oppose chivalry and even feign insult at harmless displays of it (see battle between the sexes)

Contents

History

Roots of the movement in the United States and the United Kingdom include the Women's Suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the Women's Liberation (or "Second Wave Feminist") movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Second Wave Feminism had its roots from Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, who both advocated for the abolition of the career of housewife with the false implication that it was comparable to a Nazi concentration camp or a parasite.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which proponents claimed would address the inadequacies of the Fourteenth Amendment concerning women and citizenship, was proposed in the US in 1923. The amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was ultimately defeated, falling just three states short of the required three-quarters majority on June 30, 1982. Some conservatives, particularly Phyllis Schlafly, felt that its passage would entail adverse consequences, including making girls subject to the military draft, requiring taxpayer-funded abortion, the end of single-sex schools and classes, requiring the issuance of homosexual marriage licenses, and the revocation of laws that protect women in dangerous jobs, such as factory or mining work. Indeed, in states that passed their own versions of ERA, several of these results were subsequently ordered by courts.[12]

The feminist movement in the West evolved in the 1980s with the rise of so-called Post-Feminism (also called "Third-Wave" feminism), which stresses that women have many rights that go unrecognized, often by women themselves, in everyday life, and in the American legal structure. Most members of the feminist movement support reproductive rights currently guaranteed by American law, including the legal right to abortion. This stance is opposed by many conservatives.

Leading political commentator Rush Limbaugh to coin the term "Femi-nazis" to refer to extreme feminist activists.

During the administration of Bill Clinton, feminism made a partial resurgence, although feminist leadership was criticized[Who says?] for largely failing to criticize President Clinton's sexist behavior toward female employees as both Arkansas Governor and U.S. President.[13][14]

Larrey Anderson, philosopher, writer and submissions editor for American Thinker, links feminism to Marxism, and concludes, "Feminism by grounding itself in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, is condemning women to a new servitude: slavery to the state."[16]

Feminism and reason

“Our culture, including all that we are taught in schools and universities, is so infused with patriarchal thinking that it must be torn up root and branch if genuine change is to occur. Everything must go - even the allegedly universal disciplines of logic, mathematics and science, and the intellectual values of objectivity, clarity and precision on which the former depend.” — Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies, (New York Basic Books, 1994), p.116 [4]

↑ "Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that." - Vivian Gornick, University of Illinois, "The Daily Illini," April 25, 1981. "You Don't Know Feminism"

↑ "But sometime between the Ides of March and Canada Day, I remembered that I'd given up baking cookies as a political act in 1975. ... No self-respecting feminist could be found in the company of cookie dough." [3]

↑ "(Almost half the married women in the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1990 kept or hyphenated their names.) If you read the New York Times wedding pages, and shut up, you do, the phrase 'the bride, who is keeping her name' seems like the norm, unless his name is Rockefeller. http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2003/10/16/names/index.html]

↑ For example, the Hawaii and Massachusetts Supreme Courts ordered the issuance of homosexual marriage licenses based in part on their on their state ERAs, and the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered taxpayer-funded abortion based on its state ERA.